Composer of the Week: Handel

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

Kate Molleson

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: George Frideric Handel (1685-1759): A head full of maggots

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

A head full of maggots

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), A head full of maggots

Donald Macleod focuses on Handel the organist. Today, Handel’s got a brand new organ.

This week Donald Macleod focuses on Handel the organist. Today, Handel enriches the orchestration of his oratorio Saul with a carillon, three trombones and a brand new organ.

This week Donald Macleod looks at Handel the organist. Today, Handel enriches the orchestration of his oratorio Saul with a carillon, three trombones and a brand new organ.

When Handel’s librettist Charles Jennens paid a visit to the composer while he was at work on his oratorio Saul, he found his head to be “more full of Maggots than ever” - maggots being not the larvae of flies, but an archaic term for ‘bizarre ideas’. The first thing to disconcert Jennens was “a very queer Instrument which He calls Carillon. ’Tis play’d upon with Keys like a Harpsichord, & with this Cyclopean Instrument he designs to make poor Saul … stark mad.” Then there was the trio of sackbuts (trombones) Handel was planning to use - creatures about as rare in 18th-century London as Muscovy ducks. And to cap it all, there was to be a specially commissioned contraption - “an organ of £500 price, which, because he is overstock’d with Money, he has bespoke of one Moss of Barnet.” The carillon, the sackbuts and the bespoke organ - which features in a number of florid concerto-like movements - all contributed to an orchestral texture that prompted Handel scholar Winton Dean to suggest that “in its richness and grandeur of orchestration, Saul has scarcely a rival in 18th-century music.” Handel kept the trombones for Israel in Egypt, but its predominantly choral sound seems to have had a relatively lukewarm reception from audiences that had previously appreciated his operas.


Saul (Act 1 scene 2, Symphony)
The Sixteen
Harry Christophers, conductor

Saul (Act 1, Symphony)
The Sixteen
Harry Christophers, conductor

Saul (Act 2 scene 1, ‘Envy, eldest born of Hell’)
The Sixteen
Harry Christophers, conductor

Saul (Act 2 scene 5, Symphony)
The Sixteen
Harry Christophers, conductor

Saul (Act 3 scene 5, Elegy on the Death of Saul and Jonathan)
The Sixteen
Harry Christophers, conductor

Israel in Egypt, HWV 54 (Pt 2, ‘The people shall hear and be afraid’)
The Monteverdi Choir
The English Baroque Soloists
John Eliot Gardiner, conductor

Organ Concerto in F, HWV 295 (The Cuckoo and the Nightingale)
Bob van Asperen, organ and direction
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment


Producer: Chris Barstow

Composer of the Week: George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod focuses on Handel the organist.

Donald Macleod on Handel the organist. While he mainly improvised on rather than composed for the organ, it was not until the mid-1730s that he produced his first concertos.

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A head full of maggots

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